Texting While Driving

Do we really need a warning label on a bottle of Drano stating that ingesting the contents could result in death?  Is it really necessary to stamp “Do Not Eat” on those little packets of silica gel that came in the box with your new stereo?  Do you need someone to tell you not to put a firecracker in your mouth?  You would be hard pressed to find anybody who has actually done any of those things, yet texting while driving is common enough that it has become one of the leading causes of vehicle accidents.

You might think that distracting one’s self from the road while controlling a two-ton or more vehicle would be tantamount to drinking Drano, therefore, nobody would do it.  Sadly, it happens all too often.  For example, in 2009, a 30-year-old school teacher in Endwell, New York was killed by one of her own students… a teenager who was texting while driving.

It seems ridiculous that laws have had to be passed making such an activity illegal, much like warning labels on chemical bottles, but it’s a statement of how common it is.  The 2008 Chatsworth train collision in Los Angeles, California was blamed on the operator of one of the trains missing a signal due to sending a text message.  That tragedy killed 25 people, including the distracted Metrolink engineer.

In June 2009, Car and Driver magazine conducted a study and found that reaction times and stopping distances increased 36 feet for reading texts, and nearly doubled to 70 feet for writing and sending a text.  By way of comparison, being legally drunk only increased stopping distances by four feet over an unimpaired driver.

Another study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute a month later showed that drivers took their eyes off the road for an average of four to five seconds while sending a text… long enough to travel the length of a football field.  That’s one hundred yards of other vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, and various other obstacles in harm’s way.

Unfortunately, studies in many of the states that have passed laws and bans on cell phone use show that accident statistics continue to rise in spite of those restrictions.